Abstract: This article brings distinct strands of the
political economy of communication and economic geography together in order to
theorise the role digital technologies play in Marxian crisis theory. Capitalist
advances into digital spaces do not make the law of value obsolete, but these spaces
do offer new methods for displacing overaccumulated capital, increasing consumption,
or accumulating new, cheaper labour. We build on David Harvey’s theory of the
spatial fix to describe three digital spatial fixes, fixed capital projects that use
the specific properties of digital spaces to increase the rate of profit, before
themselves becoming obstacles to the addictive cycle of accumulation: the primitive
accumulation of time in the social Web, the annihilation of time by space in
high-frequency trading, and affect rent in virtual worlds. We conclude by reflecting
on how these digital spatial fixes also fix the tempo of accumulation and adjust the
time-scale of Marxian crisis theory.

Acknowledgement: Many thanks to our Digital
labour 2014 roundtable for helping us flesh out these ideas: Karen Gregory, Austin
Walker, and Matthew Tiessen. And also to Jen Jack Gieseking and Mark Graham for
comments on early drafts.

1. Introduction

In 1994, US telecommunications giant MCI was busy transitioning the Internetfrom a
research network for specialists and hobbyists to a commercialized communications
system that could potentially enter the offices, homes, and pockets of everyone on
Earth. They had long been one of the private contractors managing the pre-Internet
National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) and were about to embark on their own
ambitious fiber-optics construction project. Advertising that networkMCI plan was a
young Anna Paquin, who appeared in an empty desert to tell TV viewers: “There
will be a road. It will not connect two points. It will connect all points. Its speed
limit will be ... the speed of light. It will not go from here to there. There will
be no more there! There will be no more there. We will all only be here.”

Capital has always pushed for faster and faster communication and transportation
networks that would make distance and locality obsolete as the space between separate
spheres of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption was erased. “This fantastic desire for what
Marx (1993a, 524) called “the annihilation of space by time” was embraced
by the leading architects of MCI's network infrastructure, with Vint Cerf saying,
“When you're in a fully networked environment, there isn't much in the way of
'there’” (Hafner 1994). This sort of millennial, liberal zeal for the
end of distance and the free flow of ideas has circulated around communications
technology for centuries (Mattelart 2000). While critics such as Morozov (2012)
have often noted the utopian desire present in these predictions, such desires arise from
real social contradictions, and the virtual possibilities of new technologies that
often come up short (Mosco 2005). These technologies and their effects cannot be
reduced to mere false consciousness or propaganda for the communicationsindustry. Communications technologies really do change the geography of capitalism, and digital spaces really do provide new sites of accumulation.

This is of course not only an opportunity, but also a danger, as crises move
rapidly from one site to another. Critical political economy asks how the geography
of capitalism forms and reforms itself to exploit labour anew, and how specific
technological and organizational changes help craft new spaces of exploitation. We
argue here that the digital spaces formed by technologies such as the Internet are
experimental spaces where capital seeks freedom from contemporary limits: Old
strategies of accumulation are re-attempted in new spaces and new strategies are
crafted through trial and error in the never-ending quest to surpass or displace the
internal contradictions which lead to crisis. The concept we use to describe this is
the digital spatial fix. We use this concept to find new sites of accumulation
and crisis formation. This shows that while the fundamentals of the cycle of capital
circulation have not varied from Marx’s original analysis, it has found novel
methods, appropriate to the contemporary historical context, to attempt to escape its
inherent limits.

Capital has long sought what David Harvey (1981; 1981; 2001; 2003) calls a
“spatial fix” to declining rates of profit and the possibility of
over-accumulation: expansion into new or under-exploited geographies becomes a way to
dispose of accumulated capital or to create fresh opportunities for new accumulation
at faster rates than before. Digital spaces can act as outlets for the same sort of
fixes we have seen in the past while providing new opportunities for exploitation and
accumulation. Meanwhile, digital spaces potentially intensify and extend those same
crises.

For Marx, capital is value in motion and so digital spaces, like older formations
of fixed capital, are necessarily sites where that value is fixed in place to allow
for value production; but that fixity, even if it is a fixity of Web platforms or
warehoused servers, eventually becomes a barrier to further accumulation in need of a
dose of ‘creative destruction’. We will describe these new avenues and
their interaction with physical pieces of capitalist geography below, but our main
purpose here is less to catalog every possible strategy and outcome and more to
provoke economic geographers to grapple with the materiality of digital media and for
theorists of digital media to integrate their maps of technological spaces with the
social relations of economic geography. The challenge is to map how and why a
communications giant like MCI might seek to annihilate “there” and replace
it with “here”, and what might come of their attempt.

It is important that we not consider digital spaces to be unreal or somehow
divorced from the material world. This is the meaning many have in mind when speaking
of the ‘virtual’, or the now-outdated “cyberspace” as a purely
representational plane, but neither should materialists overcorrect and wholly
identify, say, the mobile meet-up app Grindr with a brick-and-mortar gay bar. They
are not equivalent and there are things you can do in one that you cannot do in
another, but the interaction between the space a bar takes up on Grindr and the space
the bar takes up in a building tells us a lot about how virtual space really works. A
few typed messages and pressed buttons on Grindr will alter the material
configuration of the bar: people will get up and leave, or come to meet each other
for sex in the bathroom, or maybe the owner will reconfigure that bathroom to keep it
from becoming a cruising spot. The digital space of Grindr is thus a space of
potential, an active engagement with what the bar might yet become.

This is what we mean when we talk about "virtual spaces": Not spaces of
pure representation or imagination, but spaces of Aristotelian potential, spaces to
actualize what-might-be. Thus in what follows we use ‘digital’ to describe
technologies based in the transmission and storage of binary code and
‘virtual’ to describe the more general state of becoming of which digital
spaces are only a subset. After all, the paper maps that imperial powers used to
divide Africa into exploitable chunks in Berlin in 1884–1885 were virtual
spaces with very material effects, just as, from capital's perspective, something
like Facebook’s virtual map of relationships reorganizes social life into a form
more amenable to accumulation (Griffiths 1986; Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2011).

Surplus value production is here always still a matter of exploited labour
directed by capital. Value is never merely imagined into existence by financial
genius or cultural fetish. The old rules still apply even though the methods have
advanced. In this manner, we can consider all of Harvey’s “spatial
fixes”, and the revisions others have proposed (Brenner 1998; Herod 2009; Jessop
2013) as “virtual fixes”. Different pushes into new spaces will have
different effects depending on the technologies, state policies, organizational
forms, and social relations involved, yet all actively create new potentials for
accumulation. The work that has to be done is in deciphering whether and how these
potentials are actualized. Like Harvey, our perspective on the virtual fix emphasizes
and builds on certain aspects of Marxian political economy in order to address a
specific problem: in his case the historical geography of capitalist expansion, in
our case the role of digital technologies in crisis formation. Marx emphasizes this
sort of virtuality, implicitly, and explicitly, in his examination of labour power
and circulation time. Because of the unique qualities of the labour power commodity
it is always at risk for potential devaluation as capital threatens an external move
(e.g. outsourcing, scabbing) or internal development (e.g. speed-ups, new machinery)
which lowers the value of labour power.[1]
This is a virtual fix. In circulation the problem is turnover time and the struggle
to reduce it.[2] New transportation
methods or means of communication and coordination that minimize the time assembled
commodities rest in production facilities (i.e. “just-in-time” production)
keep capital in motion and reduce the potential for devaluation. This is a virtual
fix.

By describing the search for virtual fixes across the materials of
capitalism’s history, we hope to show that our approach to today’s digital
spatial fixes is distinct from those approaches that attribute to the information
economy both a radical newness and an unmooring of the means of production from
material goods. Digital spaces are still material spaces: stored on servers, coded by
humans, transmitted over cables or antennae, clicked with fingers. At the same time
the precise nature of their materiality has important consequences for accumulation
and crisis. Information can act in many different phases of the capital circuit but
it is always materially embodied. As Graham (2013) argues, the "cyberspace"
metaphor reduces complex networks of social life to a single, immaterial plane. This
reduction is useful for state or corporate actors trying to justify the tracking and
regulation of activities difficult to pin down geographically, or proposing purely
technical solutions to thorny political problems.

Our materialist ontology thus makes no Platonic distinctions between physical and
digital labour or materials. It acknowledges that production and reproduction of
humanity is entangled with digital technologies, and that these digital technologies
are sites of new forms of affective labour. At the same time, it doesn’t
privilege them above other forms of labour that aren’t directly tied to digital
technologies. It is important to reiterate that, like Boutang (2012), Fuchs (2010), and
Dyer-Witheford (2015) we believe the labour theory of value holds, even as labour is
increasingly fragmented, skilled, reskilled and deskilled. That so much labour in the
digital economy is unwaged does not change the fact that valorization is still
realized by companies like Facebook or Twitter. The question of unwaged audience and
user labour was best examined and answered in 1977 by Dallas Smythe. We believe his
work on the audience commodity in network television still sets the starting point
for understanding the production of value in what appears at first glance to be the
opposite of the traditional factory. Smythe’s work, explored below, shows
Marx’s original conception of abstract general labour can be updated to take
into account these new forms of affective labour (Fuchs 2010). In the end they are
the sources of value that are exploited by capital as it is increasingly faced with a
variety of contradictions, struggles and crisis.

Indeed, this is the task of any rigorous theory of capitalist technology: To track
the historical, geographic, and sociological development of the labour-capital
relation and its precise materialization. Too often, such theories emphasize either a
sharp break with both the materials of prior modes of production, erasing the
development and repetition of capitalist strategies to resolve accumulation crises,
or the labour theory of value on which industrial labour-capital relations are said
to rest, erasing the endless technological advances aimed at controlling, repressing,
or extracting labour’s unique ability to produce value. Hardt and Negri (2000)
are symptomatic of these tendencies. They argue that value is now beyond measure,
thus making the labour theory of value politically and empirically obsolete, and that
labour in this new mode of production is largely “immaterial”—either
producing a non-physical commodity, participating in “informationalized”
industrial production, or working mainly in symbol analysis (293). Our analysis of
new digital spatial fixes, especially the “primitive accumulation of time”
that develops from earlier, similar strategies, demonstrates that the struggle to
capture, measure, and valorize surplus labour time is still at the core of the
contemporary labour-capital relation. This analysis proceeds under the assumption
that “immaterial labour” is anything but (Caffentzis 2007). Work that
produces affects is always deeply embodied, as in the centuries of “women’s
work” required to reproduce capitalism. The informationalization of production
is always reliant on “dirty” labour-intensive industries elsewhere on the
supply chain. And service or cultural work always relies on fixed capital projects
and always produces commodities that, though they may not be physically tangible, are
certainly material in their production and consumption (e.g. the millions of working
hours going into a big-budget video game).

In what follows we will briefly situate our description of digital spaces as fixes
for over-accumulated capital within the literatures of the political economy of
communication, geographies of economic crisis, and theorizations of the “network
society”. Then, mirroring Harvey’s description of three spatial fixes, we
will describe three experimental digital spatial fixes we see operating in the
current political economy: the primitive accumulation of time in social media, the
annihilation of time by space via financial infrastructure, and the rise of affect
rent in marketplaces for digital commodities. We conclude by reflecting on the
questions these conceptual foundations pose for further research, especially
regarding the links between these digital spaces, the temporality of accumulation,
and more traditional geographies of crisis. The goal throughout is not to catalog the
potential of digital spaces to act as spatial fixes, but to model a spatial approach
to digital media.

2. Political Economy of Communication: Concentration, Agglomeration, and
Commodification

Communication technologies create new spaces and rewire old ones. Our work
specifically addresses how capital in its current formation has embraced the space of
the Internet and the attendant technologies it has enabled. While the political
economy of communication has long incorporated space as a key concept and topic of
analysis, those that need addressing in relation to our argument concern the study of
concentration, agglomeration and the commodification of audiences.

Studies of concentration tend to focus on the concentration of ownership, rather
than physical geographic concentration. It not only brought forward questions of
vertical and horizontal integration but also the technologies and organizational
forms that allow for such concentration (Chandler 1977). Likewise, in studying
phenomena such as the cross pollination of various boards of directors with board
members from other, competing firms, studies of concentration revealed how hegemony
within industry itself was maintained (Burt 2012; Scott 2012).

Our interest in space and its relationship to capitalism, however, is more related
to physical geography then what concentration studies offered, and thus our affinity
lies more with agglomeration studies. As a method it moved beyond investigations of
direct ownership and outright mergers and towards the study of industrial ecosystems
in bounded geographic spaces, the built environment of industrial production, and how
various kinds of capital supplement each other. Agglomeration studieswas one response
to theories of the “network society”, which suggested that communication
technologies would implicitly create less reliance on spatial co-presence.
Agglomeration studies challenged this, suggesting that regional geographic spaces
would become more important for capital, not less (Mosco 2009). In this way
agglomerated industrial development is positioned as a virtual fix, potentially
solving the crisis of vertical integration. The rise of Web startup culture,
alongside the still in-vogue concept of the “creative city”—which
emphasizes the comparative economic advantages of cities based on scales of
agglomeration rather than concentration—would suggestthat agglomeration studies
provided a powerful analytic to understand the impact of new technologies on
capitalism’s use of space.

The commodification of human communication has also been an important area of
study in the political economy of communication. Dallas Smythe’s (1977)
intervention was to specifically ask what the economic function of
advertiser-supported media is. He proposed that they produced an “audience
commodity”. He argued that prior Marxist accounts focused all too often on the
media and communication industries as ideology machines, suggesting that they were
merely a function of the “base” in Marx’s base and superstructure
metaphor. For Smythe this critique avoids the answers that careful materialist
analyses of the communication industry could reveal. He writes:

This is the threshold question. The bourgeois idealist view of the reality of the
communication commodity is "messages", "information", "images", "meaning",
"entertainment", "orientation", "education", and "manipulation". All of these
concepts are subjective mental entities and all deal with superficial appearances.
Nowhere do the theorists who adopt this worldview deal with the commodity form of
mass communications under monopoly capitalism on which exist parasitically a host of
sub-markets dealing with cultural industry, e.g. the markets for "news" and
"entertainment" (2).

What follows from this critique is his assertion thatbroadcast media is, at its
core, a realm of unwaged labour. The commodity that broadcasters sell to advertisers
is the audience and their attention. Smythe says that the content that broadcasters
distribute is akin to the “free lunch” once offered by restaurants and pubs
to encourage the purchase of profit making alcoholic drinks (5). This is not to
suggest that the content of broadcasters doesn’t itself have a variety of
artistic or cultural or propagandistic use values but rather that it is
secondary to the transaction. In this way, Smythe reveals how Marx’s
concept of the commodity fetish functions: the primary appearance of the
commodity’s use value (messages, entertainment) mystifies the commodity’s
real value as exchange value (audiences sold to advertisers). The
audience’s labour time viewing advertisements is sold (Meehan 1993). The
audience is then “paid” in media content, which the worker cannot actually
use to reproduce themselves, meaning that the labour is unwaged.

In the political economy of communication, and communication studies generally,
Smythe’s work had a lasting impact on how media has been understood, especially
juxtaposed with other popular theories of communication technologies under
capitalism. Broadly speaking, on one side stands the interpretation of media
primarily as purveyors of content and ideology, with either the Frankfurt
school’s psychoanalytic and Marxist (Habermas 1991; Horkheimer and Adorno 2007)
framework or the media ecology of Marshall Mcluhan (1994; 2008). Theories that
utilize Smythe’s work, on the other hand, place this or that media industry into
the wider economy and the production of exchange value. It is the latter with which
we align. For example, Vincent Mosco’s analysis of the disjoint between the
ideology of technological utopianism and the material economic effects is the core of
his work both on the early dot-com boom (2005) and his recent work on the realities
of cloud computing (2014). Studies of audience labour online (Nixon 2014),
intellectual property and rent extraction (Rigi 2014), and the relationship between
games and labour (Lund 2014) have all utilized Smythe’s typology. In a similar
vein, but not necessarily engaged with Smythe’s work specifically,
Dyer-Witheford (1999; 2015) and Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) have
contextualized communication and cultural industries with theories of autonomist
Marxism, communisation theory, game studies and Deleuze’s (1992) later work.

Our argument extends prior theories of unwaged labour into a discussion of
capital’s spatial advances. That capital, when given the opportunity, meshed
itself into the fabric of the airwaves—into the radios and televisions of the
private home itself—is an example of the kind of virtual fixes we are
interested in building a method to discover. It should come as no surprise that
modern social media platforms and other Internet-based servicesoffered for
“free” are much the same kind of free lunch and unwaged labour relationship
that Smythe identified in the 1970s. What is important to note is that is that these
services engage in a spatial strategy that is informed by, but distinct from, prior
media forms.

This then extends into the study of industrial agglomeration, the impact this has
on urban development, and the development of specific urban governance strategies
that privilege the development of “entrepreneurial” (often Internet-based
or -reliant) capitalism (Harvey 1989), often at the expense of those parts of society
either unwilling or unable to engage in this new economy. The political economy of
communication’s focus on the spatiality of ownership is also important, in that
monopolization and strategic partnerships is a key aspect of new kinds of spatial
fixes on take place online. Owning the platforms and software is a new virtual fix in
the same way land rents were a novel strategy at the birth of industrial
capitalism.

3. The Geography of Economic Crisis

Since the 1970s, a generation of geographers have investigated how crises of
capitalism develop within and spread across the world market and the built
environment. This political economic perspective has its roots in a variety of
Marx’s scattered spatial critiques. One such observation is the dialectic formed
between the homogeneity of a world market and the geographical division of labour
required for profitable commodity production. Another is that ever-faster
communications and transportation infrastructure are necessary to overcome barriers
to the circulation of capital and so function as the “annihilation of space by
time” (Marx 1993a, 524). With respect to crisis formation, the basic
contradiction here is that capital, as value in motion, must be frozen in place in
order for accumulation to occur. This may come in the form oftechnological
investment, a particular organizational form, or investment in physical or social
(e.g. highways, schools) infrastructure that increases the speed and volume of
circulation or the productivity of labour. This fixity means capital is necessarily
over-accumulated locally over time, as the initial opportunities to employ it
profitably decrease due to capitalist competitors deploying more effective means of
production elsewhere, the working-class organizing around the geography of
accumulation, or demand flagging for the glut of commodities. Money saved, means of
production, infrastructure or labour power itself will then be devalued, or new
territories of accumulation sought out (Harvey 1981). David Harvey describes
capital’s geographic dilemma in this way:

It has to build a fixed space (or “landscape”) necessary for its own
functioning at a certain point in its history only to have to destroy that space (and
devalue much of the capital invested therein) at a later point in order to make way
for a new “spatial fix” (openings for fresh accumulation in new spaces and
territories) at a later point in its history (2001, 25).

Harvey’s (1981; 1982; 2001) signal contribution to this field was to unify
Marx’s spatial critiques and build on them to craft a theory of how crises can
form within some capitalist geographies and be resolved by others. To do so, he
raises interest rates and land rents to the same level of priority as wages in the
struggle over surplus value. In his “first cut” theory of crisis, the
struggle over wages manifests as an ongoing increase in machines’ role in
production and the trend towards the devaluation of that fixed capital. In the
“second cut” theory of crisis, the interest rate functions as the measure
of the socially necessary turnover time embodied in fixed capital and the credit
system, as the nervous system coordinating capital flow, then becomes a means to
displace or delay crises of over-accumulationover time. In the “third cut”
theory of crisis, land rent is theorized as a future claim on fictitious capital and
the means of coordinating those capitals. But this coordination is a site of
intra-capitalist conflict and fights regularly break out over just which sites, with
which relative geographical advantages, can best further accumulation.

This, Harvey (1981) argues, is why Marx concludes Volume 1 of Capital with what
appears to be a digression into Ireland’s history as a British colony: because
capital is constantly searching for a spatial fix which can resolve the crisis of
frozen capital by creating new markets to combat underconsumption, by outsourcing
production to sites with a higher rate of profit, or by the primitive accumulation of
cheaper labour abroad. This search for a spatial fix, a global solution to local
over-accumulation, leads to the persistent displacement of crises from one geography
to the next. Other researchers have built on Harvey’s theory to argue that
crisis formation and resolution appears not just as a fix for the location of
capitalist activities, but the scale of those relations: an imperialist push for
uneven development succeeded by post-WWII Keynesian states succeeded by financial
networks focused on regional competition and transnational corporations (Brenner
1998).

A particularly rich vein of research has focused the spatial fix perspective on
the specific questions of postwar urbanism. Neil Smith (2002) argues persistently
that the state-assisted redevelopment of once-abandoned Western inner cities has been
a key site of accumulation since the 1970s, especially after the flight of
large-scale industrial production from these sites. Feminist geographers such as
Melissa Wright (2001) find other fixes in the movement of certain aspects of
production and reproduction from waged work to unwaged housework (and back again), as
well as the gendered and sexualized aspects of the restructuring of urban economies.
This re-fixing often upsets the established social order leading to the activation of
police powers to ensure the demolition of legacy structures and to manage the
labourers rendered surplus by automation or outsourcing (Wacquant 2009).

In updating the spatial fix framework, it is important to emphasize Harvey and
Smith’s approach to relocation and redevelopment as both cause of and solution
to crises of over-accumulation, especially in the former’s focus on
“fix” as not only situatedness or solution, but also addiction (Harvey
2001). But in exploring how capital moves between various sorts of physical and
digital spaces, we take as a model the feminist Marxist interventions which track the
movements of the work of social reproduction from home to state to market as a sort
of virtual fix (Luxton and Bezanson 2006). This approach will become clearer when
contrastedwith some of the dominant theorizations of the present mode of production
as a ‘network society’.

4. Network Society in Crisis

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1990s New Economy boosters celebrated a
fully globalized economy where commodity production became weightless and placeless
(Huws 1999). A number of researchers, largely sociologists, tamped down on these
millennial claims while still rigorously arguing for an epochal shift from an
industrial society to an information society or network society whose main hallmarks
were 1) a capitalism with a largely informational character, where, for example, the
paradigmatic product is software rather than automobiles and 2) a global networked
geography where places gain command roles not primarily through their relationship to
the nation-state but through their position in and power over networked
‘flows’ of information. A materialist theory of crisis formation
necessarily departs from this tendency towards stagism in order to focus on the
materiality of technology and the continuity between modes of production.[3] But while the network society critique may
lack a unified theory of crisis—partly because it is hard to imagine an
over-accumulation of the immaterial—it is still the dominant argument in
discussions regarding the changes global capitalism has undergone since the 1970s.
Manuel Castells has focused on the social construction of space throughout his career
but is best known for his encyclopaedic theorization of the network as the
now-dominant social form (2009). This network society, compared to industrial
society, is based on horizontal communications technologies and their widespread
distribution of culture and labour; the diminished role of the nation state and the
rise of the region and the transnational corporation in global politics; and new
hegemonic experiences of space (determined not by place but by network location) and
time (determined not by the sequence of the clock, but by social and economic
requirements to disaggregate and reorder time). Castells distinguishes his
formulation from common conceptions of a postindustrial “flat” world, which
are untenable in the face of persistent uneven development. Instead, he argues that
centres of informational power direct industrial production, and that new forms of
"just-in-time" production would be impossible without networked modes of
distribution. The most recent edition of Network Society addresses the 2008
global financial crisis, but does so to confirm trends identified in previous
editions such as increasing securitization and internetworked financial systems.
There is not a consistent theorization of crisis or a comparison with crises past,
but a fearsome invocation of a new financial “global automaton” which no
one can control (xx–xxii). Saskia Sassen’s (2001) research shows how
globalization concretizes into command centres for informational capitalism:
“global cities” such as New York, London, and Tokyo. Such cities are
centres for producer services—a sector of intermediary firms in the Finance,
Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) industries but also management, design, and
high-tech maintenance, with a largely business-to-business orientation. In so doing
each city becomes a “partly de-nationalized platform for global capital”
(Sassen 1999, 86). In describing the agglomeration effects of producer services and
these firms’ efforts to denationalize some but not all of a region’s
economic infrastructure, it becomes clear that networks both human and technical are
always material and that specific places produce specific networks with specific
orientations via their emergence in some places but not others (Sassen 2001).[4] Because her study focuses directly on the
re-working of global finance following the fall of Bretton Woods and the urban
gentrification that is a partial result of producer services agglomeration, Sassen
does offer a gesture towards links between space, technology, and crisis. There is
both a Schumpeterian sense of the necessity of old decline for new growth in her
description of retail and real estate in global cities, as well as a recognition of
Harvey’s point that capital mobility is dependent on spatial fixity. But the two
critiques do not necessarily join. A description of crisis formation may be beyond
Global Cities’ scope but the work there does form an important part of a
broader critique of the “flow” concept as an immaterial, bloodless
descriptor of capital hypermobility (see also: Mezzadra and Neilson 2008).

While the shape and pace of the movement is a matter is of much debate, it cannot
be contested that capitalism’s expansion has always entailed some forms of both
globalization and the interconnection of communications networks. Mattelart (2000)
argues that networked enterprises like railways and telegraphs were the progenitors
of a, “capitalism with global ambitions”, always accompanied and empowered
by liberal ideologies of free trade and free speech. Beniger’s (1989) mapping of
the “control revolution”[5]
finds an economy led by information processing rather than physical goods production
emerging not in the 1970s but the 1930s, with roots extending much earlier. This is
an explicitly crisis-based theory where communication technologies help to coordinate
and stabilize out-of-control economic materials. For example, regular train crashes
demanded a standardized timekeeping system and a communications system to manage it,
while whole new methods of branding, market research, and public relations were able
to coordinate consumption and align it with new productive capacity. While focused
more on communications theory than political economy, Beniger's materialist critique
of the links between industrial and informational economies is a helpful
methodological guide for what follows.

5. Crisis Moves

Harvey's (1981) original theorization of the spatial fix gave three basic
strategies for resolving local over-accumulationand impending devaluation, each
infinitely variable: exporting capital for production, creating new markets abroad to
resolve local underconsumption, and increasing the size of the proletariat through
primitive accumulation. In a similar spirit, we offer three fixes that digital
technologies make possible: the primitive accumulation of time, the annihilation of
time by space, and the creation of affect rent. Each will be described as they
currently operate and their crisis tendencies demonstrated. Importantly, we see each
potential fix as a prototype—strategies which capital will refine and broaden over
time. Similar prototyping can be seen throughout history, as American manufacturing
firms first left cities for suburbs, then North for South, then Mexico for China,
etc. Or as the Portuguese developed the trading and management of slaves on the
island of Sao Tome in the sixteenth century before expanding to the Americas (Davis
2006).

5.1. The Primitive Accumulation of Time

Marx used “primitive accumulation” to refer to the historic movements
wherein land-held-in-common was privately enclosed, feudal were obligations
dissolved, and labourers were divorced from spaces of social reproduction and forced
to sell their labour to capitalists for a wage (Marx 1990). Subsequent
re-examinations of Marx’s critique found in it not primarily an historiographic
commitment to locating the single, original moment of the creation of the European
industrial proletariat. Rather, it reflected Marx’s ontological commitment to
tracing how the reproduction of the labour-capital relation always relies on the
forced separation of labourers from the pre-capitalist means of production in order
to commodify resources and grow the proletariat (De Angelis 2001). Highlighting the
ongoing nature of this capitalist violence, Harvey terms these movements
“accumulation by dispossession”. Glassman (2006) positions Harvey’s
critique within a variety of feminist, anti-colonialist, and environmentalist
critiques of the “extra-economic” means of accumulation that proceed today
in a variety of spheres: capitalists’ local reliance on not-yet-proletarianized
workers and their resources, “capitalist appropriation of the gendered labour of
social reproduction” (617), and the enclosure of resources previously held in
common. The latter may manifest as the commodification of natural resources such as
forests, the privatization of welfare state functions and the redistribution of that
capital in capitalists' favour, or the transformation of cultural traditions or
genetic information into “intellectual property”. Capital relies on some
non-capitalist spaces for social reproduction, but regularly invades and restructures
others to fix falling profit rates. Harvey (2003) sees these capitalist raids of
proletarian resources as particularly active in the neoliberal era, a shortcut around
persistent difficulties with restoring the profit rate within production proper.

We use “primitive accumulation of time” to refer to the profit model of
social networking sites and most of the free Web: access is free but your activity is
enclosed and recorded so that your patterns of socialization can be packaged and sold
to data brokers and advertisers. It is a quantitative development of Marx’s
original concept, taking advantage of extra-economic means of coercion in new social
spaces in order to accumulate not new labourers but tiny slivers of labour time.
Sites such as Facebook maintain their rate of profit by regularly changing their
interface to maximize recognizable and brand-friendly forms of socialization (e.g.
the EdgeRank algorithm individualizes Facebook's home page for each user, focusing
them on the people and brands with whom they are most likely to interact) and to
encourage such socialization in new spaces (e.g. Facebook’s push to become a
universal login for other websites and the proliferation of the Like button).

This strategy of course predates the current generation of social networking sites
and will surely outlast them. Indeed, the first dot-com boom was partly driven by a
speculative fever for the possibilities of gaining massive audiences in new spaces
such as America Online and then directing them to advertisers or paid services. The
free labour of the user is the core of the free Web and the free Web is quite
lucrative: around $503 billion is spent on online advertising each year. In 2011
alone, Facebook, with only 4,000 paid employees but with 845 million unpaid users
spending approximately 64 billion hours on the site per year, made $1 billion in
profit at an astounding 50% profit rate (Fuchs 2010).

This strategy is principally about finding new times for the production of surplus
value, miniature working days which can be activated in everyday spaces. The social
Web is always on, and its tracking algorithms do not discriminate between work or
play, home or away, day or night—except insofar as the specific user labour in
these spaces and times can be differentially valued and commodified. Each scroll,
click, and share is an opportunity for accumulation of surplus labour time.
Facebook’s implementation of the Like button across diverse Web spaces is
paradigmatic in this regard, though not qualitatively different from other social
bookmarking icons. Where the dominant image of Web 1.0 was "surfing the
web", an aimless wandering among different, disconnected cultural corners, the
dominant image of Web 2.0 has been ‘sharing’ through Facebook’s
white-and-blue thumbs up button, tucked amongst content all over the Web. Working
under a pretext of social connection, the Like button collects users affective
responses, shares them with peers, allows content producers to syndicate across
platforms, and enables Facebook to become a central hub for the collection, storage,
and brokerage of online affect (Gerlitz and Helmond 2013). This collection can occur
over breakfast, at work, on the train, or in bed. And it explains why social
networking sites have found the mobile Web—where collection is both convenient
for the user and locatable for the data broker—so valuable and why they are
major sponsors for mobile Web expansion in developing markets (Talbot 2014). This
enclosure of social wandering, of surplus labour time that happens any time, is one
reason why Web giants like Google are making big investments in the “Internet of
Things”—the internetworking of home appliances and urban infrastructure
(Thomas 2006)—so that data points can potentially include not only liking a
video or searching for a restaurant, but your thermostat schedule or the rate at
which your milk carton empties (Whitney 2014).

The capitalist struggle to increase surplus labour time is not new. What is novel
is how digital media help capture that time during other times, including when the
labourer is nominally working for someone else! The experience is familiar: youeither
finish with the day’s tasks early on or you shift your attention out of boredom.
Either way you end up moving from the spreadsheet or email or cash register to
something more interesting on a mobile phone app or on another tab on a browser.
Because productivity has generally increased with the introduction of new
technologies, socially necessary labour time has generally decreased and white-collar
workers are increasingly spending more of the work-day working for social media
companies rather than their employer. This is where digital media companies take
advantage of other employers’ downtime, stealing the surplus labour time when
we’re on the clock at one job and converting it into surplus Likes, shares, and
clicks.

It is important to note that it is labour time, specifically, being accumulated
here and that, as in in other moments of primitive accumulation, this is often not
freely given. Labour time embodied in the commodity form is at the core of the
circulation of capital, and the capture of surplus labour time is at the core of the
reproduction of that circuit.[6] This fix
does not necessarily accumulate a new, distinct set of labourers who were not
previously proletarianized, but rather accumulates tiny slivers of labour time
throughout the day. This fix appears initially as an extension of Smythe’s
“free lunch” thesis, wherein Web users submit time spent clicking,
blogging, and conversing to data miners in exchange for free content or social
recognition. But this increasing sophistication is soon revealed as a qualitative
development in the methods and scope of the ”free lunch” model. In much of
the social Web, users make their own free lunch: Social networking sites, for
example, only host content produced by users for other users.

Users are also compelled to give up their labour time to capitalists online and
this compulsion, and the subsequent spaces of labour, differ from that of broadcast
media not just in degree but in kind. This coercion occurs in at least three,
overlapping ways. First, as explored above, the primitive accumulation of time
snatches labour time from other working days while it encloses other spaces of
leisure and socialization that have been forced onto the monetizable Web; e.g. danah
boyd (2014) describes how teenagers in the U.S. have been forced to interact on
social networking sites as their access to physical public space has been reduced by
moral panics, heavier policing, and a changing social geography that includes longer
commutes and fewer malls and parks. Second, those learning to labour in the knowledge
economy, at school or on their own, must build a “personal brand” and an
audience of followers in order to begin to appear employable. Third, life online has
become a “third shift” of reproductive labour wherein caregivers, who
already work waged labour shifts and unwaged family shifts, must manage
children’s social lives and coordinate family activities—which might
previously have taken place over the phone, after school, or over tea (Ammari et al 2015; Portwood-Stacer 2014).

Such coercion amounts, intentionally or not, to a forced repurposing of the
infrastructure of social reproduction for a new accumulation regime. As Harvey (1982,
398–405) notes, both state-funded fixed capital projects (e.g. roads, schools)
and the cultural superstructure atop them (e.g. standards of quality parenting) are
built up to maintain specific accumulation regimes. Their fixity becomes an eventual
barrier to increasing profit rates. “The social infrastructures which support
life and work under capitalism” must then be taken apart, moved, or
repurposed—generally in moments of crisis. Schools and libraries that provided
industrial training now promote digital literacy, youth in isolated suburbs built on
racial segregation and the automobile economy connect online as previous meeting
places like malls become less viable. Parental supervision and coordination that
previously occurred on the front porch or over the phone is pushed onto Facebook.

Conversations and clicks are not a priori raw materials of capital
accumulation—“they want transforming into capital” (Marx 1990, 874).
This transformation requires the separation of users from the means of socialization
and the compulsion to spend free time on Web spaces built and maintained for profit.
“Free labour” online is thus free not only in the sense that is unwaged but
in Marx’s original formulation of being free both from being means of
production (i.e. Facebook owns user data but not actual users) and free from
owning means of production (i.e. running a site like Facebook requires
enormous amounts of capital investment). The transformation of free labourers’
time into capital is a continual process that “not only maintains this
separation [between capital and labour], but reproduces it on a continually extending
scale” (874). This is both an intensive process and an extensive one. Intensive
in that “the social means of subsistence and of production” (874), the tiny
moments of care and contact that get labourers through the day, are ever more finely
tracked, quantified, and commodified. Extensive in that new geographies of social
life are constantly brought into the free labour process: Other working days, other
moments to check the phone, other times the labourer’s watch, clothes, or
thermostat reports their activity, more and more online spaces brought into the same
universal Facebook login or under the Like button.

The extensive movements, where more and more of the mundanities of social life are
reduced by data mining to simple abstract labour, parallel Harvey’s (1981)
observation that a spatial fix is often sought via the proletarianization of latent
reserve labour at home or abroad. These women and children are not initially
considered fit labourers but when the profit rate falls, and especially when
deskilling technologies are available, they can be plugged into the system just fine.
Breathless press releases about the Internet of Things—among other innovations
in the primitive accumulation of time—should be read with this in mind. The
surveillance data from a microwave, a car, or a vital signs monitor may not have been
worthy of capitalist consideration at one time, but today they are a priority for
firms such as Apple and Google. These are latent reserves of labour time, and new
technologies are being deployed to capture them; a tacit admission that the current
scramble to commodify personal data has reached its limits and new slivers of user
time must be accumulated from social spaces previously considered worthless.

This expansion into other working days, and the creation of tiny new working days
within “downtime”, is one reason why Web companies, and especially social
media companies, remained profitable investments during the recent recession even
while investors remained skittish of other sectors and hoarded funds (Lowrey 2014).
This digital spatial fix is succeeding and is expected to succeed further. But
success breeds competition and technological innovation. The race to generate and
sell social activity online has led to a number of quick-fix solutions, many
automated: Bots that generate thousands of Likes, scripts that ping the comments
section of several blogs back and forth, algorithmically-generated comments designed
to boost traffic on one site or drive it elsewhere.

This is the classic introduction of labour-saving machinery under competitive
pressure: social activity is a valuable commodity but one that can be generated
faster by machine. Two problems emerge. First, the value of this productive activity
cannot be finally realized in a sale;the bot won’t buy the goods advertised to
it because of its traffic pattern. Second, this generates less and less surplus value
because, as fixed capital, its future productive output is already paid for. Because
of the competitive pressure in this exploding market, such automated traffic makes up
between a third and a half of overall Web traffic. Leaders in the online advertising
community are terrified of the reality that large portions of the data profiles
they’re creating and selling are not human at all, but the products of machines
made to thrive in the market advertiserscreated (Vranica 2014). So-called
“linkbait” blogposts and comments, filled with gibberish that just links
back and forth with other posts, thus signal over-accumulation and effective demand
problems in the Like economy in the same way as new, unsold cars sitting on the lot
do for the industrial economy.

With these fake hits and fraudulent traffic, we can see this digital spatial fix
beginning to crash into its own limits. In order to increase the rate of profit,
those relying on the primitive accumulation of time may need to excise this
fraudulent traffic, thus lowering the mass of profits, or find new spaces from which
to accumulate users’ social activity. And so the push into mobile and
“smart” objects or the digital commercialization of ‘public’
spaces such as higher education become even more important.

5.2. The Annihilation of Time by Space

The second fix is, to flip Marx's famous maxim, the annihilation of time by space.
And here we move from the everyday play of Farmville or Foursquare to massive
construction projects such as Spread Networks' $300 million attempt, funded by former
Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, to build, in secret, a single-use or “dark”
fibre optic cable in as straight a line as possible from Chicago's futures markets to
New York hedge fund data centres (largely located in New Jersey) in order to transmit
buy orders as close as to the speed of light as possible and thereby take advantage
of “tiny discrepancies between futures contracts in Chicago and their underlying
equities in New York” (Steiner 2010). And while Spread worked regularly to
straighten, repair, and fine-tune their data pipeline to gain every microsecond
advantage, they were quickly overtaken by a competitor, Windy Apple Technologies, who
had secretly completed a microwave relay system that transmitted orders even faster.
Similar projects linking exchanges and data centres in London and Frankfurt are
ongoing (Onstad 2014).

This is the infrastructure for “high-frequency trading” (HFT): Finance
by algorithm at a speed no human can comprehend. As Golumbia (2013) explains, HFT is
not just marked by high-speed networks but also by co-location intended to reduce
latency; trading in micro-level time windows; sending numerous fast orders and
cancels; and attempting to end the trading day "flat", with most money made
on taking and changing positions rather than completing large orders. Large
institutional traders deplored this practice initially but now they are the main HFT
players. Against the grain of some Marxian analyses, Harvey (1982, 377) theorizes
transportation industries and infrastructure projects as large-scale efforts to
capture increased relative surplus value, producing not a physical good but relative
locational advantages. The intra-capitalist competition visible in this particular
fix should be analysed in this way: Deploying massive amounts of fixed capital to
annihilate ever smaller obstacles of time, pushing the transmission of data as close
as possible to the fundamental limit of the speed of light in order to complete
exchanges just a microsecond ahead of the competition.

Like the primitive accumulation of time, the annihilation of time by space is an
extension and intensification of an older fix rather than a qualitatively different
one. Where the annihilation of space by time refers to the reduction of turnover time
through large fixed capital projects, like railways, that defeat geographic barriers
to circulate goods as quickly as possible, we use the annihilation of time by space
to mean the construction of communications infrastructure to gain a competitive
advantage in exchange specifically and financial exchanges especially. Speed remains
the competitive advantage, but the scale of it, faster than any human can process,
creates a different relationship to spaces of value capture.

And so with Spread Networks’ pipeline or the expensive Manhattan or New
Jersey real estate devoted solely to housing servers and connections to Internet
exchange points,[7] we see a very material
spatial fix with fixed capital dedicated to grabbing higher financial profits through
microsecond competitive advantages, irrespective of the assets underlying specific
financial products (i.e. whether the trade is based in McDonalds or mortgages is
largely irrelevant to HFT). Railways re-administered time, literally creating new
time zones, to link distinct geographies of production, circulation, and exchange.
HFT re-administers geography in order to gain tiny slices of time in the sphere of
exchange. These are technologies of time-space compression that, in Brenner’s
(1998) terms, re-scale capital accumulation in conjunction with new political forms
(e.g. the railroads of state-managed imperialism, the fibre optic cables of
transnational corporate capital). Here the re-scaling links monumental, persistent
spatial projects like skyscrapers and satellites dishes with the fleeting time-scales
of automated financial exchange.

This competition for time led to an arms race in algorithms and pipelines, to the
point where, in 2010, “HFT accounted for more than 60% of all U.S. equity volume
and seemed positioned to swallow the rest” (Phillips 2013). But arms races
rarely end well, for armed and unarmed alike. And so on May 6, 2010 this particular
fix began to crash into its limits as the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1000
points, about a trillion dollars in market value, in around five minutes. The
Commodity Futures Trading Commission report on the so-called “Flash Crash”
blames one large sell-order of S&P 500 contracts for setting off the crash, but
it reverberated so quickly because of a cascade of automated sell-order responses to
that larger order and millisecond back-and-forth “hot potato” trades of
position contracts between different firms’ algorithms (SEC 2010).

Algorithms operating in the equities market reacted to this turmoil in the futures
market by withdrawing all of their orders simultaneously, creating a massive
liquidity gap which rapidly pushed shares of usually stable stocks such as Procter
& Gamble to extreme lows or extreme highs—either pennies or hundreds of
thousands of dollars per share. Stocks stabilized and liquidity returned to the
market over the next day, but not without leaving traders, regulators, and the
general public shaken. In 2012, the crisis seemed to reappear, as Knight Capital,
accounting for 17% of all trades on the New York Stock Exchange, lost control of an
HFT algorithm that bought and sold US$7 billion in shares in 45 minutes. Repairing
the damage cost the company $440 million or 40% of their valuation the day
before.

These momentary crises are shocking for their potential to disrupt the broader
financial sector but, for HFT insiders, it is overshadowed by a more general crisis
in both the rate and mass of profit: “Average profits have fallen from about a
tenth of a penny per share to a twentieth of a penny”, the HFT industry made
only $1 billion in 2012 compared to $5 billion in 2009, and about half as many HFT
trades were made in 2013 compared to 2011. Knight was bought by a competitor, Getco,
who revealed in 2013 that their profits had declined 90% over the previous year
(Phillips 2013). The generalization of HFT technology and the geographical
reorganization it facilitates means competing firms have basically erased all the
“inefficiencies”, which HFT was built to take advantage of in the first
place. And so HFT firms are nowforced to seek out new areas—social media
rumours, larger bets on future market movement, insider trading—on which to
take positions. The pipelines, microwave relays, and server farms are too expensive a
fix to abandon, and so they will need to be repurposed to capture relative surplus
value in new spaces.

Or perhaps the institutional investors will lose all faith in the technology. Or
maybe it will be regulated into unprofitability. It is important to track this
movement and its repercussions but for the sake of our argument, the future of HFT
specifically is less important than its pioneering expansion in the annihilation of
time by space. Currently these millisecond advantages are specific to financial
exchanges where that level of competition is meaningful but it is not difficult to
imagine this strategy becoming more broadly generalized, with resulting radical
shifts in the geography of everyday life. Microwork platforms such as Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk or CrowdFlower, where users crowdsource the labour necessary to
complete tasks broken up into minute components such as searching for text, debugging
code, or doing simple math, are already supplemental, but rarely primary, income
streams for the un- or underemployed, especially workers with disabilities or in
areas particularly hard hit by the recent recession. And these microworkers struggle
to grab tasks from those submitting them before competing microworkers—who
might be a continent away with better Wi-Fi or better luck (Marvit 2014). Other
microwork platforms take this model offline, with TaskRabbit allowing users to
contract out mundane tasks like standing in line or picking up dry-cleaning.

One could imagine a version of The Bridge, the ad hoc San Francisco
squatter’s community from William Gibson’s (1994) Virtual Light,
overtaken by microlabourers who use the proximity of the squat to the city’s
Internet exchange point to outcompete desperate microlabourers in other locales or to
solicit menial tasks from the gated communities on the other side of town. Such
spaces, abandoned by capital but facilitating the micromobility of labour, could
become techno-slums, the tenements of the 21st century. The competition would remain
in the sphere of exchange, with the permanently jobless fighting for the space that
would let them sell their labour power just a moment faster than the man or woman
next to them, desperately attempting to move at the speed of capital.

5.3. The Rise of Affect Rent

If this speculative image of microlabourers spending their days hitting refresh
repeatedly to gain access to micro-contracts of semi-skilled work is carried forward,
there is also the question of what these people do in their leisure time.
Recuperation of labour power necessitates rest, and that rest often involves leisure.
And within play we see another emergent fix: video game publishers, distributors and
production studios shifting their business models towards what could be described as
rentiership, in that they derive a portion of their profits from the extraction of
rents from game players, rather than solely through the sale of the video game
commodity. We call this “affect rent” and its rise is visible in online
marketplaces attached to digital games. These marketplaces revolve around the random
generation of objects whose scarcity is determined by algorithms in competitive
multiplayer games like Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike: Global
Operations. The commodities themselves take the form of cosmetic additions to the
game: in the case of, say, Team Fortress 2, they are a variety of silly hats
that you can dress your avatar in. Yet even in their supposed silliness, the
seriousness of their existence is underlined by the fact that the Washington-based
Valve Software, developer and publisher of Team Fortress 2, hired the
economist (and later Greek Minister of Finance) Yanis Varoufakis in 2012 to help them
manage this “hat-based” economy (Varoufakis 2012). Initially Valve was
concerned about managing the valuation of these hats in the players’ barter
economy; but they soon introduced the ability to buy and sell these hats with real
money, while collecting a mandatory 5–15% fee from every player transaction.
What we see, then, with affect rent is the quantitative development of older spatial
fixes for rent extraction: finding a new space (online gaming), commodifying it using
available tools (digital rights management, a proprietary platform, and a fully
enclosed marketplace) while making opting out difficult or expensive. It is not
dissimilar to rent increases in dense urban areas, which reflect the relative surplus
value that is imparted by proximity to cheap utilities, support services and an
abundant labour supply.

Here it is important to contextualize and set apart our concept of affect rent
from Marx’s concept of ground rent. In chapter 37 of Capital vol. 3, Marx
analyses ground rent’s direct link to the labour theory of value. Ground rent is
the “portion of the surplus-value produced by capital [that] falls to the share
of the landowner” (Marx 1993, 751). Ground rent is produced through a very
specific social relation, one between the landowners with a monopoly on the use of a
piece of the earth and the capitalists, which pay ground rent to exploit that land.
When the agricultural capitalist successfully wrests surplus value from their fixed
and variable capital on the land (their factories and their labourers), the levy they
pay to the landowner is ground rent. Marx is very clear that this social relation is,
most importantly, an antagonistic one, with capitalists and rentiers struggling to
assert their dominance. Because land is inherently valueless (it is, after all, not
produced by human labour) the value extracted from it by the rentier is the result of
relationships of violence and monopoly. If the capitalist fails to produce any
surplus value on the land, what is extracted from them is not ground rent, but merely
a levy or “simple” rent. Marx also notes that rent in general also serves a
purpose for capital by providing a signalling function for future productive
capacity. If rents drastically increase, this suggests that the productivity of
capital on that land will also increase.

Ground rent then, much like all of Marx’s concepts contained in the three
volumes of Capital is historically specific in its scope and aim. It is not what he
would describe as a bourgeois economic “eternal category” which would
purport to explain rent through all historical epochs and societies. Ground rent
helps Marx place rentiers, who have enjoyed a monopoly on land through a historical
process tied directly to the enclosures at the dawn of the industrial revolution
(Polanyi 2002), in the social relations of capitalism.

Affect rent describes a quantitatively different social relation, rather than a
qualitatively new one: that between players/consumers/labourers and the owners of
virtual worlds and their attendant virtual commodity marketplaces. Affect rent occurs
where video game developers and virtual world owners extract value from the unpaid
labour and play of those who create digital commodities, whose sole use value is
affective[8] (Moore 2011). These in-game
commodities are then able to be alienated by the player for any price (or
bartered/gifted) on an open marketplace. The prospective buyer pays the commodity
owner’s market price, which includes a transaction fee (the rent itself) to the
in-game marketplace owner to enjoy the affective qualities of objects, whatever form
they may take. The game and the marketplace itself, make up the digital
“land”that video game companies can demandrents from. They set the terms of
commodity creation—how much time is required to play to get commodities; how
commodities are created in-game—and the probabilities of the commodities being
randomly rewarded. In this way the players are both consumers and labourers: their
play produces the commodity which is sold to other players for real money—with
Valve extracting a rent—the proceeds of which they could then use to buy
another commodity. Inside this domain of almost total control, the digital rentier
then profits off the exchange of commodities between players.

Affect rent is thus distinct quantitatively from ground rent in a number of ways.
Most importantly, it is not based around a monopoly over already existing land, which
is inherently valueless. Instead virtual worlds themselves have been crafted entirely
through human labour, relying on human-made networked infrastructures. While we find
the concept of affect rent most visible in digital games and virtual worlds, we see
this this fix is generalizable across acts of communication, space and forms of
social life. That play itself is subject to it just shows how malleable life is to
capital. In a sense this is a logical extension of the tendencies that Lawrence
Grossberg (1987; 1996) has theorized. Affect rent is a function of the
“affective economies” he described that have existed in and around mass
media for decades. What is new is that proprietary software platforms have inserted
themselves between producers and consumers while extracting rents between all kinds
of transactions, ushering in an age of what some have called “platform
capitalism” (Lobo 2014).

What is taking place is a kind of real subsumption of play into labour, through
the commodification of the play act itself to the production of surplus
value.[9] For Marx, formal subsumption is
the incorporation of pre-capitalist forms of production into capitalism while real
subsumption entails the transformation of that production for increased relative
surplus value, achieved through management techniques and technologies that increase
productivity (endnotes 2010; Murray 2004). Selling games to consumers formally
incorporated play, but that play is really subsumed when it is itself shaped to meet
the needs of capitalist production.

One way in which digital games are subject to real subsumption is through what Mia
Consalvo (2009) calls “paratextual industries” (drawing on Genette’s
[1997] concept) that arise around the video game industry. They create new
commodities, markets and consumers, which rely on the original game as source
material. Consalvo examines these industries through their production of printed
strategy guides, cheat sections in consumer magazines, and pieces of hardware that
enables players to cheat and gain advantage in video games. While Consalvo’s
concept of the paratextual industry provides a way to describe this industry and
phenomenon, the spatial relationship that is formed is left unexplored. It’s
worth thinking about where these paratextual industries arise, and what new
paratextual industries will look like as capital creates new digital spaces to bypass
current limits. These limits were clearly visible in the video game industry crashes
of 1977 and 1983 as crises of underconsumption alongside over-valued assets (Wolf
2012).

One can interpret the creation of paratextual industries as one fix to a limit:
the video game industry’s strict reliance on only selling the video game
commodity.[10] The original commodity
becomes the basis on which to sell a variety of other commodities, not dissimilar to
the growth of merchandising associated with Hollywood cinema. Yet such fixes focused
on merchandising paratexts cannot last forever, as competition increasingly narrows
such advantages in the marketplace. As a result the video game industry has
increasingly turned to some of the same tactics that broadcast media did to develop
the audience commodity. This is achieved by transitioning video games from a
commodity that contained in its sale price the requisite surplus value to realize
profit into a medium through which players as audiences are commodified for
advertisers. This is best exemplified by the transition to so-called
“free-to-play” business models that developers such as Zynga pioneered
(Gobry 2011).These free-to-play games cost nothing to initially download and play,
but always incorporate micro-transactions that give the player new abilities or
in-game currency to spend on in-game objects and abilities. Recall that for Smythe
(1977) the content of the television or radio program is what drew in the audience
for the real labour that was to be done: watching advertisements. In the same
way free-to-play games do the same thing, offering an experience that has no initial
cost but in return requires the player to often subject themselves to a variety of
advertisements (textual, in-game, or video).

In addition to creating a new space for the audience commodity (which is more of a
function of the previous spatial fix we described, the primitive accumulation of
time) playing games itself becomes the source of labour required to develop a
particularly unique kind of digital commodity. These commodities in digital games
take on two distinct use values: the first is that which imparts an advantage in the
game and the second is purely aesthetic. Sometimes, in the cases of online virtual
worlds and massively multiplayer games the players create the commodities themselves
(Pearce 2006). This can develop intoodd and innovative systems of reciprocity and
reward, like the “Dragon Kill Points System” developed by large groups of
players in Everquest Online (Silverman and Simon 2009). More often, however,
commodities are created by fiat of the company that operates and owns the game. The
object is bought directly from the developer, or created through an act labour and
play, sometimes called “playbour” or play-labour (Kücklich 2005; Lund
2014), that is required by the developer.

While this method of in-game commodity production was pioneered in massively
multiplayer online games, it has spread out to free-to-play games like those created
by Zynga, and other genres such as first person shooters (Counter-Strike: Global
Offensive) or multiplayer action and strategy games (Defenceof the
Ancients 2). Valve is a market leader in the latter two genres. For a number of
years now Valve has experimented heavily with their Steam Community Marketplace,
which mediates the transactions of all games published by Valve, as well as some that
aren’t. While many games like World of Warcraft or EVE: Online
have marketplaces, what makes the Steam Community Marketplace special is that it
incorporates real money transfer.[11] Not
only can objects be bartered with other in-game objects, but they can be sold using
US dollars and a variety of other major currencies. This is made possible because of
Steam’s origin as a digital distribution platform for the sale of digital games.
To buy these games people can either directly purchase them with their credit card or
deposit money directly into their “Steam Wallet”. This digital wallet is
what allowed for the introduction of digital commodities in game to be sold for real
money, because the wallet allows for debiting and crediting of the account.
With the ability of players to pay each other for their digital commodities it also
meant that these transactions could now be subject to a mandatory fee, or as we
argue, an affect rent, set betweenfive and fifteen percent of the sale price. Maybe
most importantly, regular users of Steam can't take money out of the Steam Wallet,
turning their earnings into a form of company scrip.

The result of this kind of commodity creation is production that is conducted
entirely inside digital spaces themselves, with almost no connection to what might
have once been traditionallyconsidered productive labour. Yet Valve captures this
value all the same. In this case it’s a paratextual industry that arises
inside the object of the game. Spatially, it is a move away fromcapturingsurplus value in the video game production studio towards
capturingsurplus value in the network of players. In this way it has
shifted the spatial relationships that once defined the video game industry. And it
is not limited just to the paratexts of games and play: this fix exists in the
production of digital commodities in all sectors of life. Currently social media
platforms like Facebook sell “stickers” and other items that can be sent to
other users. The production of digital commodities directly linked to the production
of affect is at the core of this spatial fix. They can be as simple as digital
stickers or colourful patterns for digital items or as complex as deeply personal
letters. In the process, if these digital commodities can be traded and sold amongst
users, the fees that the service and platform holders extract generalize this kind of
rent.[12]

Thinking of paratextual items as primarily linked to affect helps conceive of the
shift in a wider context, where the production and consumption of affect increasingly
takes on economic importance. Setting it apart from the previous spatial fix, the
primitive accumulation of time, the value extracted isn’t so much the attention
of the consumer—as in the free lunch model proposed by Smythe (1977)—but
in the rent taken from consumers selling commodities produced for almost nothing,
whose only use value is affective.

The rise of affect rent as a result of the real subsumption of play means that the
video game industry continues to grow, especially in in its free-to-play and
fully marketised forms. These companies, considered by many as the industries
on the cutting edge of capitalism for their relatively high wages and creative work,
have quickly become one of the few kinds of businesses that cities pursue with
industrial and cultural policy of various kinds, but almost always with the aims of
protectionist cultural nationalism or job creation (Joseph 2013).

Alongside these more seemingly prosaic concerns is the likelihood of the
multiplication of crisis points in these (mostly unregulated) game-based marketplaces
as they extend beyond the small corners of the Web they currently reside on. Fully
subsumed play could become a larger and larger part of the contemporary economy, with
labour forces dedicated entirely to creating or capturing in-game commodities to sell
to other players at a profit. This already happens, to various extents, with the
existence of professional World of Warcraft gold farmers in China, working
twelve to fourteen hour days in offices filled with computers running the latest
version of the virtual world (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009). The same cycles and
pressures that are created in the pursuit of surplus value are replicated in these
new forms of labour: relative surplus gained through mechanization and absolute
surplus gained through the extension of the working day. At the other end of digital
production we see a possible crisis in the making as the market is flooded with these
cheap, likely useless commodities, further reducing their prices. Just as tied up in
this is the increasing reliance of digital games on advertising revenue and data
collection. In the case of the game streaming site Twitch.tv, steamers who qualify as
‘partners’ can earn money much the way popular YouTube stars do (Twitch
2015; Walker 2015). In such cases the contracts of professional e-sports players and
streamers often depends on the overall ad revenues of such platforms (Taylor 2012).
If the bottom falls out of these monetization schemes—if a crisis
occurs—the house of cards that holds up precarious digital labour and play
could come tumbling down. In the process these digital workers would likely have no
recourse due to the elaborate end-user license agreements they are forced to sign to
play, while platform capitalists could maintain their positions if they can play the
same game that rentiers of the past did: revalue their ‘land’ to speculate
on lowered productivity and devalued capital, and gouge the cyber-proletariat what
still relies on making their living through digital play.

6. Conclusions and Directions for Future Research

Our goal has been to outline how digital communication technologies give rise to
new kinds of spatial fixes. Our examples—the primitive accumulation of time,
the annihilation of time by space and affect rent—showcase new, digital
assemblages brought about by the intermixing of technology, capitalism and ongoing
crises in the wider social production of human existence. Digital spaces are
experimental venues for new accumulation regimes, where fixes attempted elsewhere are
refashioned, redeveloped, and redeployed. Digital labour is still labour—even
if it is not understood as such by the labourer—and thus is the source
of value. What is new is that digital technologies create new methods to steal tiny
slivers of working time from the labourer, exchange the value produced by labour
quicker than other capitalists, and extract rent from the very pleasure taken in
digital communities.

Our three examples do not exhaust the potential options for digital spatial fixes.
Surely others already exist or will develop. Rather, our analysis of these examples
functions as a methodological guide and a conceptual foundation for linking Marxian
approaches to economic geography and digital media. In his earliest theorization of
the concept, Harvey (1981) also explored three general examples of spatial fixes:
exporting capital to new markets of consumers, exporting capital for new, more
profitable production, or expanding the proletariat through primitive accumulation.
Others built and revised these concepts and extended them into new social fields.
Wright’s (2001) analysis of development in Ciudad Juarez showed a fix centred
not just on border factories but also on the reproduction of gendered social
relations. Brenner (1998) focused not on individual fixes but how they connect
together to re-scale capital accumulation and circulation in the wake of global
crises. With these theory-building projects in mind, we hope to encourage digital
media research that is mindful of the critical function of spatial fixes, as well as
research in economic geography that attends to digital materials. This will always
require precise documentation and explanation of economic crises and their movement
between digital and physical spaces. By way of conclusion, we offer some possible
directions forfuture research that can build on the methodological guides and
conceptual foundations provided here. Because we have thus far focused mainly on the
spatial dimensions of digital capitalism, these sketches of future research
directions focus on the how the remaking of space necessarily remakes time.
Celebrations of digital capitalism as weightless and spaceless also laud a new era of
timeless and instantaneous circulation, where value is both preserved perfectly and
transmitted without delay (Huws 1999). But just as digital media have a specific
economic geography, so too do they emerge from and produce in turn a particular
ordering of time.

Temporal patterns of over-accumulation are present in Harvey’s work from
early on: There is a persistent focus on the temporal delays introduced or overcome
by fixed capital projects, and his second-cut theory of crisis explored in Limits
to Capital (1982) explained the credit system as a sort of temporal fix that
establishes a socially necessary turnover time to regulate various capitals’
turnover time and displace current accumulation crises into the future. These earlier
remarks on time often merely add the effects of time to those of space and do not
display either the elegant dialectical reasoning or historical specificity of
Harvey’s spatial theories (Jessop 2006). Later work such as The New
Imperialism (2003) rechristens the spatial fix as the “spatio-temporal
fix” and explains the capitalist restructuring of spatial relations as
necessarily a restructuring of temporal ones. There, Harvey is especially interested
in how capitalist firms and states invest surplus capital in “physical and
social infrastructures” that take many years to bear a return, thus staving off
over-accumulation in the present while remaking a region in a way that will maximize
future accumulation (2003, 87–137). These massive investments have many smaller
spatio-temporal components: logistical projects that bring the timelines of
production and exchange into alignment, the displacement of current crises in one
geography into the future of another, and periodic “switching crises” that
shift surplus capital from primary to secondary or tertiary sectors and devalue those
sectors for the long-term health of the system. Spatial fixes are necessarily
temporal ones. And so the capitalist restructuring of digital spaces is necessarily a
reordering of the tempo of accumulation, in an attempt to displace, stall, or stave
off the timeline of crisis.

Building on Harvey’s triple meaning of “fix” as a geographic
solution to accumulation crises, a blockage that eventually leads to future crises,
and an addiction to the process, we hope our description of digital spatial fixes
prompts further investigation into the relationship between new digital accumulation
regimes and older temporal patterns of crisis. Matthew Crain’s (2014) analysis
of the dotcom crash shows how the 1990s Get Big Fast strategy to accumulate as much
market share and user attention as possible as quickly as possible relied on risk
capital funding that ignored traditional metrics like “negative cashflow”
in favour of “marketing based asset-valuation models” such as Web traffic
statistics. Future financial gains were prioritized over quarter-to-quarter revenue
and a whole chain of venture-backed online advertising firms grew to support this
future orientation—and each other—by designing, rating, and selling
audience attention. The end result was a feedback loop between online advertising and
risk capital that inflated the dotcoms beyond any reasonable valuation. Many
features of this system remain in operation today. But a massive firm like Google
effectively integrates the functions of selling, placing, rating and, in some cases,
generating advertisements online (Bermejo 2009), both through in-house technological
developments and the acquisition of firms (e.g. dMarc, DoubleClick, Applied
Semantics) that previously worked at different parts of the advertising value chain.
This would appear to be a classic case of capital concentration and it may eliminate
opportunities for risk capital to insert itself into the moments of circulation time
between different portions of the online advertising economy. But does this prevent
the over-accumulation of capital in the online advertising economy, or merely
localize it?

Capitalist spaces play many tricks with time, but it is the control and capture of
labour time, which is of the highest priority. The economic geography of digital
media connects multiple accumulation regimes with differing organizational and
technological approaches to labour time, arrayed together to maintain the
exploitation of different regimes and the overall profit rate. This is a global
problem and we are hardly the first to note the pressing need to map the circulation
of capital between digital industries with heavy fixed capital requirements and
hyper-exploited labourers elsewhere in the world. Ross (2013), for example, calls the
high-skilled digital labourers of the US and Europe and the low-paid factory workers
of Eastern and Southeastern Asia “two ends of the digital chain gang”: One
end bleeding over the assembly line products that the other end uses to power
100-hour work weeks, neither with much control over a heavily automated labour
process. Caffentzis (2013) notes that this contemporary manifestation of the
“transformation problem” is not just a theoretical concern of Marxology,
but also a crucial problem of development. Profits in industries with high fixed
capital costs, where commodity prices are often greater than their values, rely on
profits from labour-intensive industries, where commodity prices are often lower than
their values, that feed those ‘developed’ economies raw materials and means
of production. But where do digital spaces and times fit into this equation?
Ross’ image assumes geographical separation but what about Foxconn workers who
spend their leisure time on Chinese social networking site Weibo? Do they sit at both
ends of the chain gang at different times of the working day? And of course,
exploitation is not just for hardware production. Facebook’s massive advertising
revenues are made possible by content moderators cleaning Facebook pages of
objectionable material and, as explored above, by the industrialized impersonation of
“genuine” social interaction by spammers who inflate traffic metrics. The
Philippines is a centre of activity for both (e.g. Chen 2014; Clark 2015). A slowdown
in these spaces of exploitation would surely slow Facebook’s profit rate, but
how much? And what is the threshold of tolerance before a fix is sought?

It must also not escape notice that the capitalists and skilled labourers
designing the digital spatial fixes explored above are themselves enmeshed in a more
traditional fix that Harvey (1989) and his students (e.g. Smith 2002) have long
explored: The reinvestment of surplus capital into urban centres, reversing decades
of state-aided capital flight from cities to majority-white suburbs, powering a
gentrification wave, and providing a long-term outlet for over-accumulated capital.
This shift from a managerial urbanism where cities acted as local outposts of the
Keynesian welfare state to an entrepreneurial urbanism where cities compete to
recruit producers, mass culture events, and gentrifiers has been accompanied by a new
boosterism celebrating the “creative class”. In Florida’s (2003)
account, these bohemian urbanites, many of them working in technology, are the
leading edge of contemporary capitalism and are attracted to ”creative
cities” whose diverse cultural offerings allow the creative class to unplug and
provide the raw, cultural materials which these skilled labourers craft into
immaterial commodities.

The 2008 crash and the dot-com bubble before it would seem to have disproved the
common sense that creative sectors would save postindustrial economies, especially in
urban centres. But Florida (2011) used the crisis to retrench his theory, explicitly
linking it with Harvey’s spatial fix argument by asserting that the real estate
crisis signalled the failure of the postwar suburban spatial fix and the needfor a
new one focused on urban infrastructure, digital technologies, and flexible working
hours. But by focusing on the spatial fix only as a geographic solution to past
crises and not as a cause of future crises or the addiction to repeat them or expand
beyond them, Florida inadvertently proves that the push to reorganize urban space for
technology workers and related creatives is the latest, most prominent example of
entrepreneurial cities desperate for a fix.

Peck (2005) argues that creative cities placemaking may just be a post-facto
endorsement of already-ongoing gentrification, making real estate and retail
investment appear as an investment in productive capacity. But Harvey’s (2003) approach points to another possible interpretation: that these different fixes are
evidence of a switching crisis in action. Technology firms flush with cash may be,
with the help of municipal governments, building buildings because they want to
switch capital out of digital accumulation circuits and into dependable, long-term
real estate investments. One example could be SalesForce’s new skyscraper at the
centre of San Francisco's Transbay redevelopment plan (Roose 2014). Another could be
the fight between Google and LinkedIn to redevelop North Bayshore (Donato-Weinstein
2015). These developments may signal capital’s recognition that certain digital
spatial fixes have reached their limits, that there is a need to shift the
accumulated surplus from the short-term horizons of the Web (e.g. Google’s $59
billion in cash reserves were, in 2013, larger than those of the US) into the fixity
of roads and buildings.

It is important to trace these links between digital and brick-and-mortar
capitalist geographies because of the real danger that digital labour will only be
seen from the perspective of those like Florida today or MCI in the 1990s, who reduce
labour to immaterial categories like “creativity” and mystify the processes
at work. Florida’s use of the “fix” terminology as a solution to new
problems but not as a function of an addiction to an ongoing cycle is thus not an
individual oversight or error in theoretical orthodoxy, but a symptom of a larger
problem. A problem where the digital economy is breathlessly treated as a sharp break
with the historical landscape of labour (as in the theories of the network society,
post-industrial society, post-fordism, etc) and, in extreme cases, with time and
space themselves.

But digital geographies are always material: based in the exploitation of living
labour and the concretization in the dead labour of machines and circuit boards. The
digital vistas exploredby players in World of Warcraft and the prosaic
Facebook viewedwhile riding the bus are made possible only through the intense energy
consumption of the data centres which double as “factories” for the
production of value in the 21st century. For example, in 2009 it was estimated that
World of Warcraft relied on over twenty thousand individual servers, all
provided by AT&T (Miller 2009). And it should not be forgotten that it is both
the outdated computers from these data centres as well as the computers the games are
played on that end up in e-waste dumps around the globe, their precious metals melted
down using medieval style smelting techniques by local slum dwellers (Greaves 2011).
That capitalism is based on exploitation is not only a political proposition, but
also an empirical demand that new forms of exploitation and their interaction with
older models of accumulation be rigorously confronted and mapped across bodies and
bits, time and space.

Notes

1After all, the labourer is
“free of all the objects needed for the realisation of his labour-power”
and so must seek out the capitalist, who owns the means of production, in order to
realize this potential (Marx 1990, 272–273).

2“As long as it persists in
one of these phases—[as long as] the phase itself does not appear as fluid
transition—and each of them has its duration, [then] it is not circulating,
[but] fixated. As long as it remains in the production process it is not capable of
circulating; and it is virtually devalued. As long as it remains in circulation, it
is not capable of producing, not capable of positing surplus value, not capable of
engaging in the process as capital. As long as it cannot be brought to market, it
is fixated as product” (Marx 1993a, 620–621). The original German for
this sentence is "Solange es im Produktionsproze§ verharrt, ist es nicht
zirkulationsfŠhig; und virtualiter entwertet." “Virtualiter” is an
arcane Latin form that, for Marx, requires its own footnote definition as
“potentiel” (Marx 1953, 538). Aristotelian philosophy had a strong
influence on Marx’s own theoretical growth (Meikle 1991). That general
affinity, combined with this specific reading of virtual as potential, would seem
to vindicate our general interpretation of Marxian relations (e.g. the value of
labour power, the composition of capital, the length of turnover time) as virtual
relationships wherein future states exist as potentials that are actualized from
the materials of present states, rather than ontologically distinct phases through
which something like money or workers circulate. Many thanks to Quinn Slobodian for
assistance with this translation.

3Both Castells and Sassen, the
main critics reviewed below, have a background in Marxian political economy but
their most celebrated works depart from this perspective. Castells for example was
trained by Alain Touraine but later became a strong critic of Henri Lefebvre’s
Marxist humanism. And while Network Society (2009) does take a stand against
“that dwindling stream of economic theory still concerned with the real
economy” (78), its only mentions of Marx are offhand dismissals (78, 222). The
work itself also engages in what could be labelled idealism, as in Castells’
discussion of Internet firms’ market capitalizations as an example of
“the creation of value out of our belief in the value we create”
(161).

4 Geographers and political
economists such as Smith (2002) point out that by prioritizing the role of the
global city in contemporary capitalism, Sassen may be mistaking command functions
for production proper. This is because the city remains a key site for production
the world over, especially Asian, Latin American and African cities, which did not
see the mid-century Fordist-Keynesian compact between state, labour, and capital
that Sassen describes as weakening in global cities. This charge may be true, but
can be corrected by putting Sassen’s global cities theory into conversation
with critiques of urban production in the Global South, which she does herself in
later work (2009; 2014).

6Of course the real measure of
value is not just any labour time but socially necessary labour time—and
social necessity cannot be judged except at the end of the circulation process.
Social networking sites may thus be “overvalued” not only in terms of
their market cap being inflated through financial exchanges largely divorced from
production, but in terms of over-accumulation. That advertising click-through rates
remain low, that web content firms so often operate at a loss, supported by venture
capital until they can figure out how to monetize a user base, may be a sign that
they have accumulated millions of hours of user labour time but cannot find a
sufficient market for it. The hours spent on these sites become the equivalent of
unsold cars on the lot. Harvey (1982, 194) notes that this “tendency to
produce 'non-values'” is a perpetual feature of the internal contradictions of
capitalism.

7The best example of this is the
co-location services provided at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan how trading firms
jockey for nearby real estate, which can network with the building and gain further
advantage (Miller 2013).

8The term “affect” is
here used in reference to the expressive, non-material qualities of objects. It is
an ontological property that in absence of a being to interpret it lacks any
function (DeLanda 2006).

9 Here we use a specifically
historical conception of play rather than a formal or ideal one. Play is best
understood in modern society as the leisure act that exists in relation to the way
in which society structures and reproduces itself. As Silverman and Simon (2009)
say, "in modernity, one has to play because one works, and play in this sense, has
no significant meaning outside its relationship to work” (354). At the same
time it also exists in direct relationship with a variety of macro and micro
assemblages. For more see Taylor (2012) and Joseph and Knuttila (2013).

10See Dyer-Witheford and de
Peuter (2009) for more on the distinct political economy of video games, which
shares in common many concerns associated with other media industries like
television and film, while also having very unique characteristics.

11The creation of digital
property in games and virtual worlds is storied and quite complex at times. Much as
land was once the most important asset for early capitalism (Piketty and Zucman
2014), digital land in games like UltimaOnline and in Second Life
was especially important. See Dibbell (2003; 2009) for an early take on the
emergence of this.

12The latter is an extreme
example, based in part on Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her. In it the
protagonist, Theodore Twombly, spends his days working in a sleek downtown LA
office ghostwriting personal letters. In so doing the customers outsource the
production of affect entirely to Twombly, whose final product is a letter that he
hand mails when he leaves the office at the end of the work day.

Murray, Patrick. 2004. The Social and Material Transformation
of Production by Capital: Formal and Real Subsumption in Capital, Volume 1. In The
Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital, edited by
Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor, 243–73. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rigi, Jakob. 2014. Foundations of a Marxist Theory of the
Political Economy of Information: Trade Secrets and Intellectual Property, and the
Production of Relative Surplus Value and the Extraction of Rent-Tribute.
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 12 (2):
909–36.

U.S. Securities Exchange Commission. 2010. Findings
Regarding the Market Events of May 6, 2010: Report to the Staffs of the CFTC and SEC
to theJointAdvisory Committee on Emerging Regulatory Issues. U.S.
Securities Exchange Commission.

About the Author

Daniel GreeneDaniel Greene is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Maryland
and a University Flagship Fellow. His ethnographic research focuses on the origins
and effects of the hope that Internet access and Internet industries and will lift up
people, cities, and countries. He is drawing on years of fieldwork among Washington,
DC’s tech start-ups, public libraries, and charter schools, in order to build a
political economy of the so-called digital divide and show how wealth and poverty are
produced and understood in cities trying to kickstart their tech sectors. Other
current projects look at the economic geography of digital labour and the ethical
arguments of drone warfare memes. He can be found online at dmgreene.net.

Daniel JosephDaniel Joseph is currently a Ph.D. student and researcher at Ryerson and York
Universities in their Communication and Culture program. He is also a member of the
Counterpublics Working Group at Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York
University. He has written extensively about the politics at the heart of the
knowledge economy, independent video game development, cultural policy and
contemporary philosophy. His dissertation looks at how digital distribution and
marketplace platforms like Valve Corporation’s Steam change and reshape how play
and work are discursively understood and materially practiced.